Last time, we have seen how a sequence of activities works with internal bookmarks to schedule the execution of the next step, introducing a queue to hold these bookmarks.We left with a question: what if execution is not sequential?In fact, one of the advantages of an extensible workflow framework is the ability to define custom statements; we are not limited to Sequence, IfThenElse, While, and so on but we can invent our own, like Parallel:

And even have different behaviours here (like speculative execution: try several alternative, choose the one that complete first).

Clearly, a queue does not work with such a statement. We can again use delegates to solve this issue, using a pattern that is used in several other scenarios (e.g. forms management).When a composite activity schedules a child activity for execution, it subscribes to the activity, to get notified of its completion (when the activity will finish and become "closed"). Upon completion, it can then resume execution (the "internal bookmark" mechanism).

child.Close += this.ContinueAt;

Basically, we are moving the bookmark and (above all) its continuation to the activity itself. It will be the role of CloseActivity to find the delegate and fire it. This is exactly how WF works...

Now we almost everything sorted out; the only piece missing is about recursion. Remember, when we call the continuation directly, we end up with a recursive behaviour. This may (or may not) be a problem; but what can we do to make the two pieces really independent?

As you may have noticed, we are giving away a little optimization; a direct call when the activity just completes should be much faster.Also, why would we need a queue? We could do just fine using Tasks:

Which makes things nicer (and potentially parallel too). Potentially, because in a sequential composite activity like Sequence, a new Task will be fired only upon completion of another. Things for the Parallel activity, however, will be different. We will need to be careful with shared state and input and output arguments though, as we will see in a future post.

Are there other alternatives to a (single threaded) execution queue or to Tasks?

(Example code from MSDN)I used the CCR and I have to say that it is initially awkward, but then it is a style that grows on you, it is a very efficient, and it was way of representing asynchronous with a "sequential" look, well before async/await.

The IEnumerable/yield pair have a very simple, clever implementation; it is basically a compiler-generated state machine. The compiler transforms your class to include scaffolding and memorize in which state the code is, and jump execution to the right code when the method is invoked.

In fact, I would say you can: even if you do not consider that 5 years passed and the implementation of yield is still the same, the CLR will not break existing code. At IL level, the CLR just see some classes, one (or more) variables that holds the state, and a method with conditions based on those variables. It is not worse (or better) that serializing delegates, something we are already doing.

The iterator-based workflow code sits in a branch of my local git, and I will give it a more serious try in the future; for now, let's play on the safe side and stick to the Task-based execution.

Until now, we mimicked quite closely the design choices of WF; I personally like the approach based on continuations, as I really like the code-as-data philosophy. However the serialization of a delegate can hardly be seen as "code-as-data": the code is there, in the assembly; it's only status information (the closure) that is serialized, and the problem is that you have little or no control over these compiler generated classes.

Therefore, even without IEnumerable, serialization of our MiniWorkflow looks problematic: at the moment, it is tied to BinarySerializer. I want to break free from this dependency, so I will move towards a design without delegates.